Osama bin Laden was reported missing yesterday – a few days after the United States threatened to bomb Afghanistan if the wealthy terrorist was not handed over.
Spokesmen for Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban militia said bin Laden and his family have been missing since Friday, and it was not known whether he had left the country.
A U.S. National Security Council spokesman hinted that U.S. intelligence has an idea of the whereabouts of the suspected mastermind behind American embassy bombings in Africa.
“I can tell you the one thing we do know is he is not where he belongs,” spokesman P.J. Crowley said.
“He belongs in custody to face justice for the murder of more than 250 innocent Americans and Africans from the bombings in August,” Crowley said.
The Saudi-born dissident was thought to have been living in Kandahar, the Taliban’s spiritual center, under heavy security.
The vanishing comes just days after Afghanistan said it was cutting off his ability to contact the outside world.
“We did not order him to leave Afghanistan. We are not aware of his whereabouts,” Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar said.
There was speculation in diplomatic circles that bin Laden has either gone into hiding in Afghanistan or has found sanctuary in a radical Islamic state or former Soviet republic.
Crowley refused to be specific about what the United States knows about the disappearance.
“I can’t comment on what we know about his current whereabouts for intelligence reasons,” Crowley said.
The United States wants bin Laden extradited or expelled from Afghanistan to face charges of planning the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania last August in which 250 people were killed – offering a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture and conviction.
After the bombings, the United States launched a missile strike on suspected bin Laden bases in eastern Afghanistan, killing at least 26 people.
The United States delivered a message to the Taliban on Feb. 3 asking for bin Laden to be handed over to Washington or Saudi Arabia.
On Feb. 11, the Taliban said they had deprived bin Laden of facilities to communicate with the outside world, placed restrictions on his movements and dispatched an “observation group” with him to watch his activities.
Bin Laden, who had been in Afghanistan during the guerrilla war against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, returned there in 1996 after being forced out of Sudan.